About Egypt Naming
Friday 4 March 2011
, Posted by Octa at Friday, March 04, 2011
Egypt is one of lands which has very long culture history, because it has geographycal site that makes it a bridge for many traffics of all people, until now.
But let us know, why it named Egypt and Misr (for Arabic pronouncing).
The English name “Egypt” was borrowed from Middle French (Egypte), from Latin (Aegyptus), from ancient Greek Aígyptos (Αἴγυπτος). The adjective aigýpti-, aigýptios was borrowed into Coptic as gyptos, kyptos, and from there into Arabic as qubṭī, back formed into qubt, which is in English Copt.
Miṣr, the Arabic and modern official name of Egypt (Egyptian Arabic: Maṣr) is of Semitic origin, directly cognate with other Semitic words for Egypt such as the Hebrew מִצְרַיִם (Mitzráyim), literally meaning “the two straits” (a reference to the dynastic separation of upper and lower Egypt). The word originally connoted “metropolis” or “civilization” and means “country” or “frontier-land”.
The ancient Egyptian name of the country is Kemet (km.t), which means “black land”, referring to the fertile black soils of the Nile flood plains, distinct from the deshret (dšṛt), or “red land” of the desert. The name is realized as kīmi and kīmə in the Coptic stage of the Egyptian language, and and appeared in early Greek as Χημία (Khēmía).
In essentials, Egypt (Miṣr) naming was based on geographycal site and its land, its inhabitant and its history.
But Even today, people who speak one language often change the spelling of words in another language because of the difficulty they may have in pronouncing some of the sounds of that foreign language. Hence, in pronouncing Hwt-ka-Ptah, the Greeks changed this world to Aegyptus (Aigyptos), which they used in their literature as the name of an Egyptian King (perhaps Ramesses, though in a fictional manner), the Nile River and for the country itself. We find the word used by Homer in his famous "Odyssey. We believe the Greeks had difficulties with the Egyptian pronunciation of the letter "H" at the beginning and end of Hwt-ka-Ptah.
Bravo..!